Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Our closest and most likely threat, the sun, is a mere 93 million miles away. At any moment, unprovoked and without warning, it could go on the attack. This attack comes in the form of solar flares which are massive explosions of energy, the equivalent of tens of millions of hydrogen bombs being detonated all at once. And as powerful as these bursts of radiation are, they’re sometimes only the beginning of a solar temper tantrum. On top of that, there is material that gets thrown away from the sun called Coronal Mass Ejection. This is an intense initial release of energy of billions and billions of tons of hot gas magnetic field that is pushed away from the sun traveling at speeds of a million miles per hour.

As a Coronal Mass Ejection, or CME, rockets toward the earth, it drives a barrage of high energy particles in front of it. The environment around the sun is filled with a solar wind made up of particles of the sun’s atmosphere. When the CME plows into this material, it creates a shockwave that accelerates the particles that are in front of the CME. If it’s flying in our direction, it means real trouble for the planet earth. If the sun fires one at us in 2012, you won’t have much time to prepare, even if you see it coming. The bulk of the CME would reach us in just a few days. The particles that are accelerated by the CME move to close to the speed of light. These particles can take as little as 10’s of minutes to hours to reach earth. When it does, the shockwave of energized particles will slam into satellites in orbit, shorting out electronics.

If you see this light show in your neck of the woods, it could be a warning sign of imminent catastrophe.

Having a huge influx of charged particles hit the Magnetosphere, causes the magnetic fields to move and that in turn will cause electric currents on the ground. These currents can cause power fluctuations, cause transformers to be shorted out, and this would then bring down the power grid and cause blackouts. But this won’t just be a minor, temporary power outage. The power grids around the country and around the world today are much more interconnected than they used to be. If we’re hit by a solar blast powerful enough, cascading failures and power systems could fry the entire world’s electric grid. Rolling blackouts could sweep over entire continents. According to a recent report issued by the National Academy of Sciences, full recovery could take 4 – 10 years. If entire countries fall victim to an unrecoverable blackout, the consequences could be devastating.

If you have a solar storm that strikes in the dead of winter, people could suddenly find themselves freezing to death. We would have no electricity for refrigerators and freezers, we would start losing food, and there’s only so many canned baked beans in the world. Soon people wouldn’t have water for drinking or agriculture or sewage. Modern civilization would be hurled back into a literal dark age, and the result could be anarchy. It’s most likely that in many places we would see marshal law break out. We could be looking at the breakdown of society as we know it. With each passing year we become more vulnerable to this kind of mishap because the electrical power grid is more and more burdened with greater loads of electricity.

Every 11 years, the sun reaches a maximum level of activity when it can typically fire off two or three CMEs every single day. At the end of 2012 it’s expected to be entering the next solar maximum. Basically the sun gets extremely angry at the peak of these solar cycles and as it reaches the maximum, it becomes a very bad time to be in space. If the sun throws some surprises our way, the consequences could be far worse than just losing our technology.

The burning out of the world’s satellite network and the frying of power grids could be only the initial beating we might take in 2012.

Lately, there have been fears that our planetary security guard is falling asleep on the job. Given how important the earth’s magnetosphere is to all of us, it’s a little discomforting to see that it appears to be getting weaker all the time. One huge dip in the magnetosphere allows harmful solar particles to penetrate closer to the earth’s surface than anywhere else. This vast chink in the earth’s armor stretches across the Atlantic Ocean from South America all the way to Africa. The South Atlantic anomaly is like a hole-punch compared to the giant rip in the earth’s magnetic field that we’ve discovered just recently.

In the summer of 2007, astronomers discovered a magnetic weakness 10 times larger than anything thought possible. The entire daylight side of the magnetosphere was temporarily breached by a magnetic blast from the sun. This basically leaves the surface of the earth open to a massive influx of radiation from the sun. It almost becomes a game of Russian Roulette because you don’t know when this magnetic hole will open up and drench you with radiation.

But what if it’s even worse than that?

What if all of this weakening is a warning sign that the field is about to undergo an even more radical transformation. Some have speculated that this decrease in the earth’s magnetic field strength may be a sign of the earth’s polarity flipping, meaning the north and south magnetic poles change position. When the poles flip, north becomes south and compass needles reverse. A lot of doomsday fanatics confuse that with the idea that the north and south physical poles are suddenly going to swap places, as if the earth is going to suddenly start spinning in a different direction, but that is not what happens at all. The continent and the orientation of the earth in space stays exactly the way that it is, but a reversal in a magnetic field could still turn life on earth on its head. In the process of the magnetic field flipping, there will be a point in which it’s very low and weak, and if the magnetic field becomes significantly small, it could be quite devastating.

If we experience a weakening of the earth’s magnetic field, solar particles will be able to penetrate deeper. These particles would slam into the stratosphere creating nitrates. These nitrates will begin eating away at the ozone layer. Without the magnetospheres protection, each consecutive solar burst would do more and more damage to ozone molecules. Our ozone layer would basically be ripped to shreds. Under a barrage of UV radiation, photosynthesis in plants would drop and ocean plankton would die. Although plankton may not seems very important to us, it is vital to our ocean life. If the plankton die, it disrupts the entire earth’s food chain leading to massive starvation and the collapse of the ecosystem.

As the field struggles to gain back its strength, north and south poles could start popping up everywhere, causing compasses to point every which way. Migratory animals commonly read the earth’s magnetic field line in order to navigate. The disruption of the earth’s magnetic field would cause a lot of animal life to not know where it was supposed to migrate during the winter months. As a result, entire species could become extinct.

The earth’s magnetic field has pulled 180s on us before and it will flip again. It happens periodically and is a very natural occurrence. Civilization, however, has never lived through a reversal like this.

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